Worldwide Movement News ::   Chirac's attacker belonged to the 'bovver boy' Right

From Charles Bremner in Paris
Times Online Article

MAXIME BRUNERIE, the neo-Nazi militant who tried to shoot President Chirac, was confined in a Paris psychiatric unit yesterday as investigators said they believed that he had acted alone in Sunday’s attack.

The Paris police chief ordered M Brunerie, 25, who fired a .22 rifle at the President during Bastille Day ceremonies, to be kept in a high-security unit because of the danger that he represented to himself and others, the Prosecutor’s Office said.

An investigating judge is seeking expert opinion on whether M Brunerie, an accountancy student from the southern Paris suburbs, is mentally fit to face charges of attempted murder over his action by the Place de l’Etoile on Sunday morning.

The incident, although played down by M Chirac, revived the spectre of political assassination in France four decades after right-wing underground forces made repeated attempts to murder President de Gaulle.

After questioning militants from the murky ultra-right youth movements to which M Brunerie belonged, investigators said they were reasonably certain that he had no accomplices in his bungled attempt to kill the President. The Prosecutor’s Office said there was no legal doubt that M Brunerie’s act had been premeditated. After buying his rifle on July 6, he had bought six boxes of ammunition and travelled to Burgundy in a hired car to practise shooting.

M Brunerie’s associates had told investigators that in addition to the doctrines of the French ultra-Right, he had been attracted by United States white supremacist organisations and by the ideas of the C18 neo-Nazi movement in Britain.

As France digested the gravity of M Chirac’s brush with disaster, a picture emerged of his would-be assassin as an introverted, football-obsessed suburbanite who was active in the racist youth groups which operate on the fringes of the political far Right.

M Brunerie, who lived with his parents, had joked to friends about “doing something to Chirac” and had posted an internet message last week inviting readers to “watch television next Sunday morning”, police sources said. The friends did not take the threats seriously.

M Brunerie was tackled by bystanders as he was trying to turn the gun on himself. In a disjointed explanation, he told police that he wanted to “change the regime” in France. M Chirac telephoned yesterday to thank the men who grabbed the gunman.

It emerged that M Brunerie had stood as a candidate on the list of the far-right Mouvement National Republicain (MNR) in Paris council elections last year. The MNR, a breakaway from Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front, won no seats. Bruno Megret, who founded the MNR and is one of M Le Pen’s former lieutenants, said that he deplored the assassination attempt and regretted that “some are trying to give this a political meaning when the gunman turns out to be a psychiatric case”.

Although the long range and surrounding crowds made it unlikely that M Brunerie’s amateurish attack would succeed, it has been taken as a measure of the danger to the State from political extremists. M Chirac made light of M Brunerie’s act, saying: “A .22 rifle is not serious.”

Some newspapers, including the conservative Le Figaro, treated the shooting as a relatively minor incident, relegating it to inside pages.

However, on a visit to London yesterday, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the Prime Minister, said: “I was deeply affected by this event. Being in high office means that you have to banish fear . . . it demands courage.”

The gunman’s parents, Jean and Annie Brunerie, an aerospace technician and an office worker, were returning from holiday in Spain yesterday. Neighbours on their quiet housing estate at Courcouronnes, in the Essonne department described Maxime as a fanatical but quiet-mannered fan of the Paris Saint-Germain football club, who affected the “bovver boy” look of the French hard Right: close-cropped hair, bomber jacket and boots.

Police said that he had come to the attention of police Intelligence when he began appearing at violent far-right youth demonstrations in 1997. He belonged to the Groupe Union Défense (GUD), the oldest ultra-right student organisation. More recently he had held positions of responsibility in the Unité Radicale (UR), an umbrella organisation for the neo-Nazi Right.